Listen to the interview with Diet Cig on the Culture Creature podcast in the player above or in iTunes or Stitcher. Diet Cig are a pop-punk duo from New Paltz, New York. The band’s new LP, Swear I’m Good At This, will be released this Friday.

Diet Cig Interview Highlights

Alex Luciano on lyrical honesty: “All of my songs are directly about feelings I’ve had, so it’s definitely challenging sometimes tapping into those emotions to write about them. Sometimes they are still very raw. It’s not just like I can sit down and [immediately access the emotion]; it’s kind of like drawing that out of myself and getting genuinely emotional to the point where I feel like I can write honestly about it. Also, the idea that when we were writing this record, it was like, ‘Oh my god, people are listening to what we’re doing now!’ I was thinking, ‘I really want what I’m saying to mean something to myself, and then hopefully it will mean something to others.’ I kind of went about it like, okay, if I can identify with these lyrics really hardcore and back them really hard myself, then other people also will feel the sincerity in them and relate to that. So just the idea of unpacking my feelings in a really sincere, honest way, which is kind of hard sometimes. Just kind of taking them and saying, ‘okay, how does this correlate to this bigger idea that I am feeling, but how can I take my own experiences and examine them through the lens of this bigger picture, in a way.’”

Alex Luciano on Guy Fieri: “I am obsessed with Guy Fieri. I love him … While we recording our record, we left the session to go to his book signing and I met him. If you listen at the end of physical copies of Swear I’m Good At This, there is a little clip of him in it. So Guy Fieri is on our record.”

Listen to the complete Diet Cig interview on the Culture Creature podcast.